Such an ecosystemic philosophy of the enterprise cannot do without a vision of entrepreneurship very different from that of the traditional entrepreneur. 

The entrepreneur is not merely someone who focuses on profit and related matters, but rather the catalyst who designs and sustains a system capable of creating value. Starting from the premise that the Person must be the protagonist of the enterprise, one easily arrives at the conclusion that entrepreneurship cannot be the exclusive prerogative of the owner-entrepreneur or of top management, but must be progressively distributed.

This is how the idea arises that every person can become a Value Entrepreneur, which does not mean that every employee must become a CEO, but rather that every person must be able to: see → understand → propose → decide → act → learn.

This is a radical transformation.

The traditional employee receives: tasks → limited responsibility → control, the Value Entrepreneurreceives: opportunity → autonomy → resources → accountability → value.

Drucker reaches a very similar conclusion in Innovation and Entrepreneurship, arguing that entrepreneurship is not a character trait reserved for founders, but a systematic discipline that any organization — and, in principle, any person within it — can learn to practice. 

Entrepreneurship as a function to be distributed, not as a gift reserved for the chosen few.

This is a principle on which Drucker builds one of the most influential categories in contemporary management: the knowledge worker, the worker whose principal productive resource is not physical strength but knowledge. In Post-Capitalist Society, Drucker goes so far as to argue that knowledge has replaced capital, land, and labor as the primary economic resource — a thesis that, in different language, gives theoretical grounding precisely to “culture + knowledge + design + relationships + identity” as factors of production.

It is worth remembering that being a “Value Entrepreneur” does not mean that “every employee must become an entrepreneur”; it means something more precise, and consistent with Olivetti:

Every person must have the opportunity, the autonomy, the information, the skills, and the knowledge needed to act as a value entrepreneur, taking on their own accountability within a community in which value and responsibility remain shared.

This formulation builds a particularly solid bridge between Olivettian humanism, Intelligent Business Agility, and modern thinking about the enterprise.

The behavior of the Value Entrepreneur develops through a series of focus areas and actions: 

1. Give Meaning: the entrepreneur must answer the question: why does this enterprise exist? Not just "what do we sell?" but what contribution do we want to make.
2. Create Conditions: the entrepreneur need not necessarily have all the answers. They must create the conditions that let people express their potential: less prescription, more enablement.
3. Distribute Responsibility: the entrepreneur must move people from the position of executors to that of protagonists. Not: "do this", but "this is the value we need to create. Find the best way to do it."
4. Invest in People: training, culture, environment, relationships, and quality of work are not incidental costs. They are investments in the organization's future capability.
5. Innovate Continuously: the entrepreneur must be able to question the current way of producing value. Rather than defending the existing model, they must continually ask: "Can we create more value in a different way?"
6. Connect the Enterprise and the Ecosystem: the entrepreneur does not optimize only the inside of the company; they observe the territory, the market, society, technology, and relationships. The enterprise must evolve together with its ecosystem.
7. Take On a Responsibility Larger Than the Economic Result: the entrepreneur is accountable for the economic result, but also for the consequences of the consequences of their action within the community. This is perhaps the highest form of entrepreneurial responsibility.

The value entrepreneur is driven by intrinsic motivations, as described in “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us” by Daniel H. Pink. 

Pink argues that the traditional carrot-and-stick method — external rewards and punishments — is an outdated model that is often counterproductive, particularly for creative and intellectual work. He places it within a historical sequence of three phases: a Motivation 1.0 tied to basic biological survival; a Motivation 2.0 based on external incentives and punishments, typical of the twentieth-century industrial model; and a Motivation 3.0, based on the intrinsic drive toward the task itself. 

On this last one rest the three pillars that give the book its title: autonomy, the need to direct one's own work by choosing how, when, and where to act; mastery, the desire to keep improving at something that matters, seeking personal growth; and purpose, the need to belong to something with a meaning larger than oneself.

Pink's Motivation 2.0 is, in other words, precisely the Taylorism that both Olivetti and Drucker were trying to move beyond.

This principle, too, has a direct antecedent in Drucker, who as early as “The Practice of Management” formulated management by objectives and self-control: shared, clear objectives, but self-governance over how to achieve them.

It goes without saying that a new organizational philosophy requires new models of leadership, which can be summed up as Smart Leadership. In it, the Olivettian idea of leadership is extended by emphasizing that the leader no longer needs to be the person with the most knowledge, but rather the one with a vision of the overall benefit.

Here too Drucker offers a precise historical link: as early as 1946, studying General Motors in Concept of the Corporation, he identified decentralization, not centralization, as the condition that makes an organization capable of adapting and of helping the people within it grow. 

Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini carry this same thesis into the present day in “Humanocracy”: they argue that bureaucracy — the pyramidal skeleton inherited from twentieth-century management — has become more of a brake than a guarantee of efficiency, and they propose replacing it with organizations built on autonomous micro-enterprises (an idea drawn from the study of RenDanHeYi), meritocracy, and widespread experimentation.

The task of a Smart Leader is precisely to orchestrate distributed intelligence to generate value, which entails vision + context + autonomy + trust + orchestration + accountability, moving away from an obsession with controlling people (tied to a Taylorist/Fordist view of the enterprise), and toward creating the conditions for collective intelligence.